


To What End

by gul



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Light BDSM, icy shark queens, weird power games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:32:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gul/pseuds/gul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for kinkmeme prompt: After the events in 'Sakizuki', Hannibal manages to track Bedelia down, kidnapping her and forcing her to resume their therapy sessions. I want to see obsessive, possessive Hannibal, a little pissed off that she dared to run away from him.</p><p>Somewhat inspired by the sentiments of Kafka's "A Little Fable:</p><p>"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."<br/>"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To What End

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Измениь направление](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4048780) by [Yallen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yallen/pseuds/Yallen)



“You’ve changed your perfume,” he says, and the soft intimacy in his voice in the warm dark and the smooth harmless surface of the statement keeps the horror at bay until Bedelia fully wakes.

Hannibal sits on the side of her bed filling a syringe and the silver of the needle glints in the dark, reflected in his red eyes like pricks of blood. 

She knows that to scream would be meaningless. It does not mean she doesn't choke one back.

“You haven’t changed at all,” she says, instead.

Bedelia thought she had run far enough but the weight of him next to her on the bed pulls at her, pulls her down to him. Alone in her new house she thought she had caught his shadow looming in corners from the corner of her eye a hundred times over and it was strange to see him in life, his sharp face all slices of bone and pooled shadows and that curved cruel mouth, smiling with such affection.

He holds out his hand for her arm.

“Hannibal—I—“

“You ran very far” he says, with a familiar pout. “It will be a long trip back.”

She was so focused on the soft grip of his fingers (it had been so long since she allowed him to touch her) that she barely feels the cold pinch of the needle at all—only the tumbling down into dark, like a fall through a trapdoor, waiting for the noose to catch.

***

The suite is small with no windows, done up in grey and blue and white, and to wake feels like pulling herself up from a well by the rope. Her movements interrupt Hannibal, unpacking food into the kitchenette—he is by her side immediately, all cold heartbreak and concern, checking her pulse, feeling her forehead. His touch sends jolts through her blood.

“Don’t touch me,” she says, still sleep-slurred. “Please. Please don’t touch me.” She looks down, though, and she is not wearing the clothes she went to sleep in.

“Necessary for the journey,” he says gently. “As I said. You ran very far.” The reproach in his voice a bitter gloss of poison on a knife’s edge. Hard to hear. Hard to taste. She feels sick. “I would hope you trust me when I say I took no liberties.”

Bedelia laughs and it is the first time he has heard her laugh since the incident, and his eyes narrow happily. She gestures around the room. “Liberties, Hannibal. And what of my liberty, to sleep and live where I choose, and to choose with whom I associate?”

“You’ll be safe here,” he said. He pushed his hand closer to her on the bed; he was consciously still, otherwise. She realized if she had been someone else he might have stroked her hair.

“Don’t lie to me. Hannibal,” and it is a command and not a plea, she tells herself. “I reiterate what I told you last we spoke. I am no danger to you.” 

Bedelia does not know that this is a lie; she does not lie if she can help it.

His jaw tightens and she realizes, suddenly, why she is there, and it has nothing to do with what she might tell others. 

“You are being proprietary,” she almost spits. “Why.”

There is a quality to his eyes where they could go dead and animal, except for those hungry pinpricks of red, echoed in the shine of tooth as he smiles. 

“I care about you,” he says. “I want to support you.” 

Hannibal does not lie; not if he can help it.

***  
Some part of her knew it would end like this, ever since the night with Miggs:

Miggs pounding at the heavy oak of her bedroom door, sobbing, and Hannibal answers the phone so quickly and asks so few questions. Only later after it was too late and she had been truly cornered does she realize that he was not showing compassion.

Half an hour before Miggs had sat across from her. Late for a patient, of course, and she had already had some wine, but she had always been so lax with him.  
Hannibal had referred him. She thought this was because of the young man’s rudeness and strange tics, like constantly flicking his tongue over his lips. Bedelia had found him trying herself, but with such a charming simplicity and eagerness to please. She let him do errands for her to feel cared for. She was careless; she told him perhaps too much about herself.

He had sat across from her and told her what he had done to her former lover for her, for her, and wasn’t she happy, wasn’t she proud—

But Bedelia was only disgusted and and at her horror he started screaming, and leapt at her. The chair clattered back and wine spilled. He was on top of her, was choking her--she clawed at his face (he bit her hand and she screamed) and scratched at his eyes, to finally land a kick in his groin and roll out from under him--but this only granted her a momentary freedom.

She could not overpower him. All she could do was run.

(She could only ever run. Retreat—away from others. Into herself.)

Bedelia slammed her bedroom door behind her and locked it. The authorities would have questions that she didn’t know the right answers to. She calmed her breathing as Miggs beat against her door, and called the only person she could. 

She never forgot waiting in her bedroom, smoothing her skirt and rebuttoning her shirt as she waited, only jumping slightly at the pounding and wailing—until suddenly it stopped.

“Dr. Du Maurier? Bedelia?” came Lecter’s voice, concerned and urgent. 

She still paused before answering. “Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Another pause. “Thank you for coming.”

“Give me one moment and I think it will be safe for you to come out,” he said.

“NO,” she heard Miggs cry, “no no no,” and then all she could hear was Hannibal’s voice, low and constant and curling so cruel round the edges—its own brand of inhuman violence. And it is as she hears his voice althought she cannot pick out the words that she begins to realize what she has done and what has been done to her. The young man weeps more and more quietly, and then there was nothing at all.

Bedelia gasps; she did not know how long she had forgotten to breathe.

Hannibal opens the door. He is unruffled as ever; he checks her for damage and brings the scrape on her hand to his lips, briefly. “You’re all right,” he says, in relief, and she does not know if he knows he is lying.

She thanks him; the words are inadequate. There is a body draped on her couch (she would have to buy a new couch; she would have to redecorate) and she goes to the kitchen to pour them a drink.

Bedelia tries to relax her thin shoulders and keep her back to him as she poured two glasses of wine, watching the red splash in. Her hand trembles and spills the wine. Her shirt was ruined already but she still curses.

She can feel Hannibal come up behind her, the warmth and weight of him. He places a hand on her left shoulder to steady himself as he reaches around to take the wine; his long blunted fingers drape over her collarbone and she can feel his breath on her neck and she knows, she knows without seeing that he is smiling like a sated cat and she feels so cold. 

And she feels like she has signed a bargain without reading it. But then again—the mice do not sign a bargain with a cat; it is implied by the nature of their existence. 

***

He would cut you off from all you knew and loved and would chase you into the corner to have all to himself—she knew this.

She had seen it with Will and she had seen it with Abigail. She had underestimated her own appeal to him. Her fault.

Every person, she had told him, has an intrinsic responsibility for their own life.

She only cries that first night, and not for very long.

There were cameras everywhere, after all.

***  
At first she refuses to continue their sessions, refuses to let him in at all unless she needs something. He must knock, she says, he must ask to enter. He seems so charmed by the suggestion that she considers rescinding, but of course she doesn’t.

The suite has one door and the locks all have a passcode. There are no books or writing materials or music—not until, it is implied, she agrees to treat him. 

Bedelia is not the first person to have stayed there, not even recently—there are hair products in the bathroom that might have belonged to a younger woman. There are toiletries that might have belonged to a man. The light over the couch has a strange harsh whiteness to it that Bedelia realizes is a sunlamp, to ward off depression and vitamin deficiencies for long-term stays. The last time she had seen one, it had been over the terrarium of her niece’s pet snake, and she tells him as much.

“Am I a pet?” she asks, as he checks the pantry, chastising her for not eating enough.

He moves to sit across from her, smoothing his suit. “A pet provides some form of comfort or utility to its master.”

“A prisoner, then.”

“That would imply punishment.”

“It would imply confinement.”

“I am not your master.”

“What are you?”

“Your patient, when you choose to resume our sessions.” Always her choice, according to him. Her decision. Always her fault. 

“You are presumptuous,” she says, and her words were ice shards under the sun lamps.

Hannibal has a way of smirking as the corners of his mouth pull down and he inclines his head—“and why not?” he says.

She has a way of smiling, a tight-lipped hint of a sneer, and she nods. Control is learned and taken and when even the wobble of an ankle in a sleek black pump betrays everything you cannot afford even that.

And cornered animals are the most dangerous.

“Then let’s resume our sessions, if only so I can be your doctor and not your pet.”

He nods, satisfied.

***  
Bedelia du Maurier and Hannibal Lecter were always of a kind and if Hannibal had a weakness it was his love of himself and the love of what was like him. They both knew the front they both kept, of ice and disinterest and manners, when every desire and statement must be examined and re-examined. They constructed and followed rules to pour themselves into like poison in a bottle. The heaviest chains go on the most dangerous prisoners and the tightest knots are tied against the hurricane winds, and inhuman desire requires inhuman control.

Bedelia is like him—there is something vicious and hungry in them both--and so she can read him. He is palpably pleased when she agrees to commence their sessions. When he arrives she moves to sit on the couch; she moves like silk through fingers, like ice sliding on velvet.

Hannibal closes the distance between them to join her. He sits on the chair opposite. He moves like a knife cuts, like teeth tear.

“You may find it predictable, but I feel we must start with the obvious,” Bedelia says, and smiles like it hurts her. “Let us talk about my living conditions.”

Hannibal frowns. “I’m afraid you will find that unproductive.”

“Were you frightened, that I spoke to Jack Crawford?”

“You spoke to Will Graham,” he says, quick enough that it seemed more like petulance than protest. He tells her too much with that.

Bedelia had to meet Will, just once, and when she met him she understood why Hannibal could not help himself—he bled, did Will, all that delicious dark pain and compassion and brilliance, like a sharkbit seal floundering in the sea. No effective boundaries but the bars between them and she could taste the intensity of his desperation up so close, and to be in his presence for someone as sensitive as she was intoxicating. Bedelia had sought to soothe, though; unlike Hannibal, the unwilling pain of others was of very little interest to her.

She tilts her head, and her hair is spun and folded gold over her shoulders. “Does that make you jealous?” 

His eyes go dark and he looks away. The unwilling pain of the undeserving was of little interest—however Hannibal’s pain was of profound interest.

“It causes me concern.” 

“I left. And you felt you did not need to respect my choice.”

“You were running the wrong direction.”

“You did not respect my choice. Just as you feel you do not need to respect Will Graham’s dislike of you.” 

His mouth twitches. She keeps pushing forward, her new preferred direction. “Why was my choice unacceptable? What am I to you?”

Hannibal purses his lips before answering. “You are my psychiatrist, and someone I care about the well-being of. It is painful and disappointing to me to see such an exceptional person continually retreat from every challenge posed her. It verges now on pathological.”

“You are not my psychiatrist, Hannibal.” He is sitting close and she is always very conscious of the pull of his presence—like an anchor bound to a too-small vessel and she always feels unbalanced around him.

“You’re mine,” he says, and it is the answer to any other question she might pose him on the matter.

She tenses but does not shiver. Instead she smiles, and holds his red gaze with her cold blue, and chooses her next words. “How is Will Graham?”

***

Hannibal genuinely likes her—his brilliant opaque doctor with her slim cool fingers in people’s heads, her electric complicated mind and her measured speech and movement. The nuance of taste to everything that rolled off of her tongue, the full expression of which was available to only the most distinguishing of palates. 

He did not expect her skill at retreat and at walls. He wanted to taste her but she was closed like a sprung trap, the bait still locked tight inside the metal teeth. Bait and trap, woman and end both, in one. 

He would not give her up and he resented that she would not accept this.

During their sessions, though, she is surprisingly aggressive. “Sometimes,” he complains, “I wonder if you might not be coaching me to be caught.”

“A good doctor operates with both her patient’s and her own best interests at heart. If you were caught, I would starve.”

She is right and it puts him at ease, that she realizes this. “A good doctor is also paid for her time,” he says. “Is there any compensation I could bring you?”

“Beyond room and board?” she shoots back. He is delighted, also, with her newfound vulgarity and the way she snaps at him.

“Yes,” he says. “Whatever I might reasonably bring you or do for you.”

“Whatever you might reasonably do for me,” Bedelia says, looking to where a window should be and taking time to taste the promise. 

What seems at the time as a complex and novel series of choices in paths through life is only ever, when you look behind, one path.

***  
He says he hates Will Graham in a cage but Bedelia knows the only thing Hannibal hates about the bars is that they keep him out. Bedelia watches as the doctor desperately leapt at any morsel of himself Will offered despite the glint of serious danger underneath the kindness—and how Hannibal refuses to see, to know, that Will is a baited hook. Man and trap, both. And he would be Hannibal’s own end.

Denied Will, Hannibal still had her. He would visit three times a week for sessions, in the afternoon, and on Sunday evenings to prepare her dinners—otherwise she kept herself occupied with books and writing and running on the treadmill. He would ask after her, bring her food, bring her clothes and compliment her appearance in them as if she were his doll. 

When he looks at her—and he is not shy about that—it is not necessarily with any sexual hunger but appraisingly, delightedly, the secret satisfied smile when he set out a beautiful dinner for his guests. Probably one of his greatest regrets was that he was the only audience for the captive Bedelia du Maurier.

He would not often touch her but when he did it was with a possessive familiarity. These touches burned her, on her shoulder, arm, waist.

She dislikes providing him pleasure as a pet and her therapy grows unforgiving. She frames his problems through Will but the shrinking walls of it were her own. 

“You seek to know,” she says, as their Friday session draws to a close, “but more importantly you seek to be known. Is that, perhaps, why you pursue these relationships with such,” she paused, “persistence?”

He blinks. “Perhaps.”

She scoffs; she lets him see that she is bored. “How will you do this, Hannibal? To know is to love and you do not know how to love. It is foreign to you. It is beyond you. You only know how to take, to devour. To devour is not to love because it is always only for your own selfish pleasure, which is the opposite of love.”

“I do what I feel is best for the other,” he protests.

“For yourself. For your own pleasure and amusement. You form these relationships as a way to explore yourself.”

He pauses a very long time before answering, looking away, chewing at the inside of his lip. She breathes in his discomfort like fresh air, like very sweet perfume. “How can one be open to another unless one knows one’s own self?”

“How indeed.” She checks her watch. “Perhaps we can discuss that next time. My payment, please.”

She could tell he was agitated by the pull of his mouth and how his eyes darkened. Hannibal reaches into his bag to pull out a beautifully wrapped package, white with a slash of red ribbon. “I feel it vulgar to emphasize the transactional nature of our relationship.

When he hands it to her, she is careful not to touch him. “Every relationship is transactional, Hannibal. You would do good to remember that.”

There are always two ways to run and an offensive can sometimes be another form of retreat. 

***

“I prefer your old perfume,” he remonstrates at their next session, his nostrils flaring.

“I know,” she says.

Her first payment was her new perfume. Before he arrives now she presses the clear liquid to her pulse points where the warmth of her blood beating so close to the surface carries the scent through the room. She does this for them both.

***

Hannibal delivers the week’s payment now before they commence treatment, always beautifully wrapped, always asking what she would like next time. He did this with the imperious pride of the cat depositing mouse corpses in its master’s shoes. He seemed particularly delighted the more strange or difficult the request, and she also found she enjoyed testing him.

Which was troubling.

She also found she always enjoyed their glass of wine after their sessions. Bedelia held these feelings at arm’s length and examined them coldly. Too much attention, and they became thoughts of other circumstances or different lifetimes.

Equally troubling.

Under these circumstances and in this lifetime, though, she would make him suffer.

One Wednesday she surprises him, after he places the packages on the counter and turns expectantly. “What can I bring you next?” he says.

She smiles for a few seconds, until he smiles back. “It is perhaps an unorthodox request,” she says. “You will have to decide if it is something you can do.”

“Try me. I am a man of many resources.”

“I will decide if it’s something I want after our session,” she says, and he tilts his head and smiles, intrigued. 

She notes with some pleasure his mild distraction as they speak.

“Now, Dr. Du Maurier,” he says, picking up his coat after the session's conclusion. “What can I do for you?”

“Make me come,” she says.

He smiles in polite disbelief; but he puts his coat down and looks her over, calculatedly.

She gives a short unpleasant laugh. “Don’t tell me I’ve caught such a resourceful man unprepared,” she says.

“Quite the contrary,” he says, and the way smiles with so many sharp teeth—were her back not already against the wall she might have been frightened. “And I have your permission and consent to do this?”

“You have my permission, consent, and expectation.” 

Always her choice. Always her fault.

He approaches her from the back of the couch, placing his hands over her shoulders (fingers draped over her collarbone purposefully; she almost calls it off, then) and he starts to gently rub, to massage, to accustom her to his touch. He strokes her long blonde hair, his hands stray lower as she relaxes, and he gently unbuttons and removes her shirt. 

The silk of the fabric and the rough firmness of his fingers are so nice, she thinks, and she will have her own selfish pleasure.

His touch ventures lower until he grazes and then cups a breast—over and then under her bra, pinching and rolling her nipple lightly as he leans to kiss her neck; his breath is hot and his lips insistent, as if he indeed had hungered for the opportunity for some time.

“He will never ask you to do this,” Bedelia murmurs. “Does this pain you?”

Hannibal nips her ear then, too hard, and tells her to lay back.

It is curious as he (almost reverently) undresses her and spreads her legs that she feels less exposed than when she opened her bedroom door to him all those months before. When he lowers himself with heavy-lidded eyes she glories at the sight of his sleek head bowed like a penitent between her knees.

He is both skilled and enjoying himself tremendously—only one of which she anticipated. When she comes it is around his hot tongue deep inside her and his thumb slick at her clit, his other hand digging so hard into her hip that he will leave marks. He makes the most gratifying sound as she pulses against him; he tastes her.

She pulls him up by his collar so she can also taste—a nip at the shallow bow of his heavy upper lip.

“Now go,” she says, sitting up to rebutton her shirt. He takes his leave by kissing her hand, the one with the faint crescent chain of scars from teeth.

***

Familiarity and time make the walls seem closer and it seems each session there is less distance for him to close between the door and the chair.

“He will not survive you,” she tells Hannibal. “He will not know you as you wish to be known or see you as you wish to be seen. He will protect himself and you will destroy him for it; he won’t survive even if you let him live.”

“Would you?”

She doesn’t answer; he lets her sit in silence for a moment.

“You told Will Graham that traumatized people are unpredictable because they know they can survive," he finally says.

Bedelia crosses her legs. “A truth you know as well as I do. I know what compromises I am capable of, which is all survival is.”

He nods. He understands. “What can I bring you, next time?”

She twists her lips as if she is considering, but she had in fact decided some days previously. “A cane, I think,” she says. “You may choose what kind.”

“How invested should I be in the decision?”

“Mmm. Very.”

***

He does not wrap it like the others. The cane is rattan, and thin and strong, and he places it on the counter with a soft click. Bedelia’s experience is not as extensive as some would think but she sees it is of the kind most likely to leave marks and draw blood.

She picks it up. It is very light, and the grip is slim enough to fit comfortably in her small hand. “I think today I will use this during our session.” The words seem far, as if said by someone else.

“An unorthodox approach.”

Bedelia smiles for a moment too long. “Not really. Undress, please. Completely.”

He pauses, catching her eye to gauge something about her intent. Satisfied, he obeys quickly and methodically, folding his dark suit and underclothes gently on the table.  
Bedelia watches dispassionately, even when he has the vanity to throw glances her way. Hannibal is very pleasant to look at, she had to confess—his form trim and handsome with age kept tastefully if not completely at bay. His body is lean and well-muscled. Unsurprising, she thinks, given the deliberate grace of his movements. The dusting of hair on his body is still dark and he is covered like ropes in strange looping scars.

She has him stand on the carpet naked before her, and then she approaches him, appraises him, grasping and turning his sharp face from side to side. His small smile mirrors her own. 

She thinks, as she pushes his hair out of place, of snapping his neck. 

(She thinks of how strong he is.) 

Bedelia lets her hand fall down slowly, down his neck over the breadth of his chest to his tapered waist and hipbone. His skin is surprisingly warm and she realizes a part of her always thought of him as cold as marble and sharktooth.

“Do I pass muster, Dr. Du Maurier?” His sibilant accent and lilt meant he always had slight trouble negotiating the francophonic rhotics of her name—he always had more trouble when he was distracted, like now.

Bedelia taps the cane on her palm, the swish-snap and sting giving her courage. “These sessions always go better when you’re honest, Hannibal. You need not focus on controlling your body’s reactions. In fact, I insist that you do not.” His smile disappears. “Now, kneel, and put your hands behind your head. Then we can begin.”

She steps out of her heels to better the angle of her strikes. 

At first she only brushes the cane over his body, watching his skin and muscle twitch against the contact. She wants him utterly focused on her touch, be it pleasant or painful, and she thrills how he seems to tense in anticipation when she breaks rhythm. They speak of simple things, commencing as ever with Bedelia determining what Hannibal wished to speak of. She started lightly swatting as they continued, getting into the rhythm of the conversation and warming up his skin for what was to come. Bedelia focuses on where she planned to strike—his thighs and buttocks, the breadth of his back.

She strikes first when he evades her question. The blow cracks through the small room and it is delicious how his muscles twitch and how the red rises in his skin. And she continues to prod him with words and to strike him when he wasn’t truly honest—

And then she just strikes. The cane swishes and slaps his flesh mid-breath, mid-sentence, and she loves how he struggles unsuccessfully to answer her without a hitch in his voice or a grunt of pain. She loves the jolt of vibration from the cane through her wrist as she hits him; it seems to vibrate all the way down between her own legs. 

Bedelia pauses. She was flushed, a little breathless. She felt dizzy. She felt dangerous. She was enjoying herself too much. She wanted to start beating him and never stop and he would love it. 

It is time to either pull back or pitch over the edge, and she says as much.

“We’re getting nowhere,” she says, “therapeutically.”

“I disagree—ahh!” he cried, as she struck with particular viciousness across his back. She loves how he gasps. She would like to hear it again.

“Hands at your side,” she says, and the red marks danced across his muscled shoulders as he obeyed.

“I am limited in my therapeutic efficacy by your unwillingness to know yourself,” she says, coming to stand behind him, resting her hand with the cane on his shoulder with her fingers draped over his collarbone. “At least you are allowing your body a degree of honesty.” 

She kneels behind him, pressing herself into his back which glowed hot from the sting of the cane, and reaches around to grasp the hard length of his cock. He gives a quick shudder against her as she leans to murmur his ear. 

“You have such control, don’t you,” she says, as she runs her hand along the hot length of him, before starting to squeeze and pull—gently at first, and then less so. A strangled hum he cuts off—he is breathing hard through his nose since he is biting the inside of his lower lip; his eyes are squeezed shut. “You pride yourself on it, don’t you, your domination of yourself and all of us around you.” 

The words are pouring out, as she makes him tremble under her hands and against her. “How you can make a maze for me to run through with nothing but death at any end. How you can dictate the beating of your own heart just as you dictate the beating of mine,” and at that he bucks into her hand.

She could swear the sound he makes as she withdraws is a whine.

Bedelia stands and readies her cane. “You think you can possess another through sheer force of will.”

He tilts his head, and she knows the expression he is wearing. “I can.”

She strikes so hard and so sudden that he cries out, and she struck like this again and again and again, and it was terrifying how good it felt, to shape his world through pain, to see her will so reflected on one such as him in red marks and cries, to be utterly in charge of every sensation—to pry him open. The cracks echo and she keeps on speaking and the edge of anger and triumph in her own honesty seeps in.

“But you are not in control, Hannibal Lecter. Think. Know. Despite yourself, and how you appear, you are drawn to visceral extremes above all. A man who truly had the control you imagine for yourself would not leave such a bright wake of horror behind him, would not let himself be so starved by lack, so possessed by the unwilling hold of another--” 

Strike strike strike and he gasps and hisses.

She pauses, breathes. “I am drawing blood.”

“Continue,” he urges.

“Continue, Hannibal? You see the problem. You will deny others but you will never deny yourself. And since you will not deny yourself you will lose your freedom. Do you see this?”

“Please! Please.”

She strikes as hard as she could and they gasp together and Bedelia feels sick at the hot white tension she would have to relieve when he left.

“You will be caught. And I only hope when you are that you will tell them about me, lest you leave me to starve.”

“I have never been caught.”

“Don’t lie to me," she says, striking. She marvels at the red stripes she leaves in her wake. There was only blood underneath his skin she knew, she could not peel the surface from him so simply, but oh, how he gasped and how her insides pitched at the sounds of his groans, how his cock swelled and twitched and offered pain and no relief.

“I have never been caged,” he amends.

“A mouse can dodge a cat but not a trap—those you run into of your own volition. You create your own cage. And, Hannibal Lecter, you will not change your desires and so you will not change your direction, and it will be your undoing.”

“You are so very insightful, Dr. Du Maurier," he says, a rasping croon, "so very exceptional.”

“What do you really want from me, Hannibal. Do not lie.”

“I only want all of you. Will you let me have you,” he says, and his voice is husky with want.

Bedelia laughs so she does not scream. Those words do not mean the same from him as if they came from another man—he means her life and her heart, not her love or her cunt.

“You have me already.”

She stands behind him, jerking his face up by his chin to press the cane into his throat, below his Adam’s apple. It is a gratifying sight, his mouth open and slack, struggling for air. She holds it there; he accepts, unmoving, head pressed into her stomach. 

When he starts really struggling for air she releases him, kneeling again to grasp his cock, which seems so hard that her touch must hurt. “As you’ve said, as you’ve always said,” she almost purrs into his ear, surprising herself. “I am yours.”

He chokes out a sound and she smiles against his skin. “You will come only when you get home, by your own hand,” she says. “But you will come. This is what you deserve today.” 

She pulls back, suddenly. “Our time is up.” The cane rattles against the counter as she replaces it--she is shaking. There is blood on the tip. She pours herself a glass of water and drinks it all at once.

He stays kneeled for a moment, steadying his breathing, gathering himself. Finally he stands. It takes him much longer to dress himself then it took to undress.

He pauses at the door. “I will make arrangements for you, Dr. Du Maurier.”

She says nothing, and he leaves. She feels like she should want to cry, but nothing surfaces. She rubs his blood between her fingers before licking them clean, and that seems to serve just as well.

***

Will Graham will let Hannibal Lecter kill him but to survive means knowing what you can live on and live with, and Bedelia du Maurier knows this better than most.

***

Their sessions continue, even as Hannibal feels the trap of his own doing closing around him. Their relationship was always transactional but Bedelia takes as much as is taken, now—peeling him apart and taking her fee in his loss and her own pleasure.

“Come for me,” she says—(she hisses, she commands, over and over)—and rides him on the narrow chair. She braces herself on his chest and pulls at his hair as he thrusts into her, with gasps and animal grunts, scraping tooth and lip on her breast. He is thick and hot and almost too full inside her, almost to the point of pain, and she prefers this intimacy to the cold black way he invades her head. When he comes, she pulls him back by his hair so she can watch him spin apart helpless and undone.

“Between your control and your desire, your desire will always win,” she reminds him, as he catches his breath against her neck, as he twists his hand in her long blonde hair.

To devour is not to love but it is the closest thing to it Hannibal Lecter knows. 

The trick would be to survive it.

***

We all build our own traps to run into. We all have an intrinsic responsibility for our own lives.

***

She wakes up one morning in her own bed in her own house and first she thinks she is dreaming and then she thinks she is dead, were it not for the neatly wrapped package on her bedside table with a note. A new bottle of her old perfume.

So happy you’ve decided to stay—see you Monday as usual, unless I am detained, the note read. Don’t change your perfume again.

She realizes the threat immediately--do not run again, it says, stay where I want and how. To wear the perfume he chooses would signal her obedience. It does not stop her from pouring it all down the drain.

Sometimes, you need only change direction.

**Author's Note:**

> man i hope bedelia lives.
> 
> ~~lipstickmata on tumblr


End file.
